Ben Stiller will not be caving to the woke mob by removing President Trump’s cameo from his 2001 comedy “Zoolander.”
Speaking on The Daily Beast podcast “The New Abnormal,” Stiller said that President Trump’s appearance will remain, noting that his cameo was a spur of the moment opportunity at the VH1 Fashion Awards red carpet pre-show.
“We were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards … and as people were coming up the red carpet, we pulled them aside and asked them to talk about Derek Zoolander, and so Trump and Melania did that,” Stiller said, as reported by the New York Post. “I’ve had people reach out to me and say, ‘You should edit Donald Trump out of “Zoolander,”’ but at the end of the day, that was a time when that exists and that happened.”
“There were so many movies [back then] that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump,” Stiller said. “He represented a certain thing,” he later added.
Ben Stiller also believes that President Trump will always appreciate the fact that he was a part of “Zoolander.” In 2016, for instance, Stiller shared a theory with MSNBC host Chris Matthews as to why he thought “Zoolander 2” did so poorly.
“There was a funny story that Chris Matthews told me,” he said, as reported by the Toronto Sun. “He was interviewing Trump during the (2016 Presidential) campaign and there was a commercial break. ‘Zoolander 2’ had come out and … was a big bomb, didn’t do well … And they’d been talking about nuclear arms or something and what his (Trump’s) stance would be with the Russians, and then … Trump brought up ‘Zoolander 2’ and started talking about why he thought the movie didn’t do well.”
“And he started going into detail (saying), ‘It’s just that in the culture people don’t care about male models any more.’ And Chris found it so interesting that he was so fascinated about why ‘Zoolander 2’ didn’t do well as opposed to what to do with the Russians and nuclear arms proliferation,” he continued.
This past Christmas, it appeared that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) cut President Trump’s cameo in the movie “Home Alone 2” for political reasons; that theory was, however, debunked by the fact that those edits were made in 2014 before Trump ran for president.
“As is often the case with feature films adapted for television, ‘Home Alone 2’ was edited for time. The scene with Donald Trump was one of several that were cut from the movie as none of them were integral to the plot,” the CBC said in a statement. “These edits were done in 2014 when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected President.”
According to Matt Damon, Trump also had a cameo in the Oscar-winning movie “Scent of a Woman” that was left on the cutting room floor.
“The deal was that if you wanted to shoot in one of his buildings, you had to write him in a part,” Damon said. “[Director] Martin Brest had to write something in Scent of a Woman — and the whole crew was in on it. You have to waste an hour of your day with a bullsh– shot: Donald Trump walks in and Al Pacino’s like, ‘Hello, Mr. Trump!’ — you had to call him by name — and then he exits. You waste a little time so that you can get the permit, and then you can cut the scene out. But I guess in ‘Home Alone 2’ they left it in.”